Young Mr. Obama (20 page)

The task force came up with eighty-five recommendations, including banning executions of retarded prisoners and requiring police to videotape interrogations of accused killers. Obama seized on the videotape proposal and determined to make it law. At first, almost everyone opposed taping, from police groups to the new governor, Rod Blagojevich.

“A criminal spends more time avoiding capture than sometimes we can spend [capturing them],” one prosecutor complained. “So if he lies for hours upon hours during his interview, now we've got eleven hours of videotape when finally the facts are so compelling that the defendant, the accused, says, ‘Okay, I did it,' and tells us what happened. What happens then is that the prosecutor now has eleven hours of videotape, ten hours of lies. Am I to show that to a jury?”

But the bill was important to Obama. Video cameras would train an electronic eye on the Chicago police, whose detectives had obtained murder confessions by smothering suspects with typewriter covers, walloping them with telephone books, jolting them with cattle prods, and burning their flesh with cigarettes. The interrogations were so painful that innocent men confessed to murders they'd never committed. Four police torture victims were freed by Governor Ryan's last-minute amnesty.

Obama met with the state police, the county prosecutors, the Illinois Sheriffs' Association, and the FOP to answer every objection to videotaping. The state would offer grants to strapped cities, Obama promised. His bill would allow audiotaping. If the police forgot to turn on the equipment, the confession could still be used as long as there was, as Obama put it, “reliability and voluntariness shown.” Obama even dug up a Florida case in which videotape helped the cops nail a lying suspect. The man claimed he couldn't have committed the crime because he was blind. When his interrogators left the room, he pulled out a sheet of notes.

Obama's arguments even impressed the senate's grimmest cheerleader for the death penalty, Edward Petka. As a state's attorney, Petka had put so many criminals on death row he was nicknamed “Electric Ed.” The year before, Obama and Petka had offered opposing points of view for a PBS
NewsHour
report on death penalty reform. Petka was against nearly all the commission's recommendations.

“The net effect, in my point of view, is simply to make it impossible for any prosecutor to seek the death penalty,” Petka had said.

Yet even Electric Ed voted for videotaping and for the death penalty reform package.

Emil Jones was reveling in his exalted position in Springfield. To celebrate his newly acquired power, he changed his cell phone ringtone to the
Godfather
theme. From his office suite behind the senate's Victorian chamber, Jones orchestrated his campaign to make Obama a senator—or, who knew, maybe more than a senator. That's how much the senate president thought of Obama's talent. Jones made sure Obama's bills passed through the Rules Committee and on to the full senate. And he leaned on other senators to support his boy, offering perks in exchange for their endorsements.

Jones had to work over some of the Downstaters. “Barack Obama?” they'd say. “That's a tough name down in Southern Illinois. How are we gonna sell him? An African-American is enough of a problem. But an African-American with a Muslim name? That's a
big
problem.”

Sparta, Illinois, got a $29 million gun range as a way of encouraging its senator to support Obama. When black senators complained about voting for guns, Jones told them to suck it up.

“You want six million dollars for after-school programs, there's gonna be a gun range in Southern Illinois,” the president rumbled.

Jones had to work just as hard on members of the black caucus, who resented Obama's preferential treatment. There wasn't much Jones could do about a house member like Monique Davis, but he called Hendon and Trotter into his office, over and over again, asking them why they couldn't support a fellow senator, a fellow black man. Hendon finally gave in after hearing Obama speak at a West Side church. The rally was packed, and Michelle Obama sat next to Hendon the entire time, assuring him that she wouldn't let her husband forget about issues important to black Chicago.

“I've got him,” Michelle told Hendon.

Hearing a homegrown black woman say “I've got him” was enough for Hendon. He stood up, walked to the front of the church, and endorsed Obama. The folks in the pews went wild. Obama's staff left piles of literature at the church, and Hendon pledged his street organization to his senate colleague.

Obama chalked up his colleagues' resentment to jealousy. They'd failed on racial profiling and death penalty reform. Once he took over, the bills passed within months. Todd Spivak, Obama's chronicler at the
Hyde Park Herald
, joined the
Illinois Times
around the time the Democrats took over the senate and witnessed Obama's ascendance there.

“He didn't think too highly of Rickey Hendon and some of those older black legislators,” Spivak would recall. “ ‘They couldn't get it done' was the message. ‘They had it for years. They couldn't get it done. I got it done. What does that tell you? If they have something against me, that's their problem. They were ineffective in their position.' ”

Nearly every Democratic state senator ended up endorsing Obama. It was just practical politics. If he won, with their support, they'd have a friend in Washington. And if he lost, without their support, he might make life uncomfortable when he came back to the capitol.

The Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired during his last term in Springfield, was the most liberal body in the senate, a popular assignment for blacks, Latinos, and big-city whites. It was the perfect platform for Obama to advance his cause of guaranteeing health care to everyone in Illinois.

Two weeks after the 2002 elections, Obama phoned Jim Duffett, the executive director of the Campaign for Better Health Care. Duffett had spent over a decade fighting to expand health care in Illinois.

“You might know this or not,” Obama told him, “but I'm now going to be the chair of the senate health committee. I'd like to sit down with you.”

The Campaign for Better Health Care had chapters in most of Illinois's cities: Rock Island, Bloomington, Peoria, and Carbondale, among others. Obama wanted to hold town hall meetings to build support for universal health care. Illinois had just elected a Democratic senate and its first Democratic governor in twenty-six years, so this was the moment.

“You guys have these local committees all around the state,” he told Duffett. “I want to go out there. I want to use this as a tool, as a chairman.”

Duffett pitched him on the Health Care Justice Act, a bill that would require the legislature to come up with a plan for covering the 1.4 million Illinoisans who still didn't have health insurance. Obama loved the idea. In the winter of 2003, they hit the road. To Obama, this was another community organizing project. On cold weeknights, dozens of people shuffled into libraries or union halls to hear the senator from Chicago speak.

Obama described the act, and then, hearkening back to his days as an organizer, he told the gatherings, “You have to put political pressure on these politicians and you've got to keep on pushing and pushing. If they say no, don't give up. If they're a Republican, and they don't support this thing, keep on putting pressure on them, because they go back to the district and they say, ‘Oh, my God, I'm really getting beat up on this issue. What's going on?' Same thing with Democrats.”

Afterward, Obama went out to dinner with the local chapter's executive committee, telling its members, “We need you as leaders for this movement.” That not only built support for the Health Care Justice Act, it built a network of union brass and liberal activists who would back Obama's just-announced Senate campaign.

The insurance industry was adamantly opposed to the act. Its lobbyists found the bill's fatal flaw: It
required
the legislature to come up with a universal health care plan. That was unconstitutional. A General Assembly can't dictate to a future General Assembly. Obama shelved the act and brought it back in 2004, with less demanding language that “strongly urged” a plan to cover all Illinoisans and created a task force to come up with a proposal.

Even the softened version was a tough sell. Conservative Democrats resisted. Denny Jacobs was an old friend of Obama's, but he was an even older friend of the insurance companies. Obama lobbied hard in the cloakroom. He forced Duffett's group to sit down with insurance lobbyists and overcome their mutual loathing to craft language both groups could tolerate. Obama even changed the panel's name from the Health Care Justice Task Force—which sounded like a left-wing pressure group—to the moderate Bipartisan Health Reform Commission.

Unlike his efforts to end racial profiling or reform capital punishment, Obama did not win bipartisan support for the Health Care Justice Act. Republicans saw it as a back-door attempt to bring single-payer coverage to Illinois. The bill contained no specifics, and the commission could only offer recommendations, but the GOP compared it to President Bill Clinton's failed health care plan. During the final debate, Peter Roskam, the Republican spokesman on health care, led his party's attack on the Senate floor.

“The Illinois Life Insurance Council is opposed,” Roskam argued. “The Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters is opposed, the National Federation of Independent Business is opposed, and the Illinois Chamber Employment Law Council is opposed. You know, this concept was one that Hillary Clinton took on in 1994 and it created such a stirring that there was a sea change, ultimately, in the politics of the United States. And it's a bill that—while it is not as draconian as what the Clinton administration tried to do, which was basically a nationalization of health care, it is a bill that you're being asked to consider today that has a lot of similar characteristics.”

Obama was taken aback and angered by the accusations, especially the suggestion that he was trying to push a single-payer plan on the state. Obama favored a single-payer plan—he'd said so at an AFL-CIO forum in December 2003—but his bill left the details up to the task force and the legislature. Although he never raised his voice—shouting was not his style—Obama defended his integrity passionately.

“The original bill on the house side, I think, would have legitimately raised some concerns with respect to some who might have been fearful that it was a mandate to introduce a single-payer plan,” he said. “I modified this. Insurance lobbyists here in Springfield have been engaging in such fearmongering among its agents, suggesting that this was a single-payer bill, that, in fact, a lot of concerns were raised that had nothing to do with the bill that was before the body today.”

Obama, who was campaigning for the U.S. Senate by then, told of meeting a Galesburg man who was about to be laid off from the Maytag plant after thirty years. The man didn't know how he could afford $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needed to survive after a liver transplant.

“The majority of people who do not have health insurance are not welfare recipients who are covered by Medicaid,” Obama said. “They're folks who work every single day, doing their best to make ends meet and try to raise a family, and the single biggest cause of bankruptcy is when they get sick.”

All his bill would do, he argued, is say, “Let's all sit down and try to figure out how to solve a problem.”

The Health Care Justice Act passed on a party-line vote, 31–26, but it ultimately accomplished very little. It certainly didn't bring universal health care to Illinois. After more than two years of meetings, the commission issued a report recommending a “hybrid” health care model that would require individuals to obtain coverage, either through their employers (who would have to provide health care) or by taking advantage of a state-funded subsidy. A minority of the members recommended a single-payer plan. The minority group included Dr. Quentin Young, who had supported Obama since his first run for the state senate. Young had always considered Obama a single-payer advocate, so he was disappointed that Obama had stripped the universal health care requirement from the bill.

John Bouman, who had worked with Obama on poverty and health care legislation, was more forgiving. “I think he was in favor of universal, affordable, comprehensive care for all, and not necessarily a disciple of one means of doing it over another,” Bouman would say. “He's ever the pragmatist, and single payer is ever the ideal. That's his particular genius, and it causes him to take it in the neck from the left as well as the right.”

By the time the commission reported back to the legislature, Obama had gone to the U.S. Senate. Some of its recommendations were adopted by Governor Blagojevich, for a plan he called Illinois Covered. But Illinois Covered never passed. It became a casualty of Blagojevich's inability to work with the legislature (as, eventually, did his entire governorship).

During his last two years in the state senate, Obama did achieve some expansions of health care. He passed a bill to change the eligibility for the Children's Health Insurance Plan—AllKids—from 185 percent of the federal poverty level to 200 percent. The new rules added twenty thousand children to the state-run health insurance program. Obama's bill also lowered the threshold for low-income parents to 90 percent of the poverty level—double where it had stood during the past two Republican administrations. That brought health care to sixty-five thousand poor people and helped solve the problem of welfare recipients refusing jobs or raises because they were afraid of losing Medicaid.

Through his committee chairmanship, and the patronage of Emil Jones, Obama sponsored twenty-two bills that became law that session, one of the highest success rates of any senator. Making the earned income tax credit permanent. Providing HIV testing for pregnant women. Requiring insurers to cover colorectal cancer exams. Forcing public bodies to tape-record closed meetings. None were as glamorous as reforming the death penalty, but it was still an extraordinary achievement for a senator who, a year before, had been an unknown backbencher. Now Obama had more than a résumé and a biography to sell the voters. He had finally done something.